ISIS Report 01/10/08
Quantum Coherent Liquid Crystalline Organism
Dr. Mae-Wan Ho
A fully
referenced and illustrated version of this article is posted on ISIS members’
website. Details here
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Invited lecture at European Quantum Energy Medicine Conference, Copenhagen, 19th September, 2008
Thank you for organising this conference and inviting me
among a panel of such distinguished fellow lecturers whom I also know to be
true scientists. Fritz Popp initiated and inspired me to learn quantum physics
from him so I could discover the delights of the quantum coherent organism
for myself, and Jim Oschman convinced me that energy/quantum medicine is for
real.
My role is to prepare you for all the exciting
things we’ll be hearing in the rest of this historic conference. I’ll try
and paint you a picture of what it means to be a quantum coherent organism,
so you can feel it in your very flesh and bones, and then give some examples
of the implications for health. The quantum coherent organism is the basis
for quantum medicine.
What It Means to be Quantum Coherent
Quantum coherence and the liquid crystalline “rainbow
worm”
I don’t say that lightly, having researched and defined the physics of organisms
in my book The Rainbow and the Worm, The Physics
of Organisms [1], first published in 1993 and now in its third, much enlarged
edition 15 years later, when its thesis – that the organism is quantum coherent
– has been further corroborated in many fields. I shall mention them as I
eago along.
The “rainbow worm” is this little fruit fly larva I first encountered
in 1992 as it was hatching from its egg. We placed a batch of eggs in a continuously
irrigated chamber on a microscope slide under the polarizing microscope and
waited. The microscope was set up so we can see the organism developing and
getting energized, right through to the arrays of molecules that make up its
tissues and cells. All organisms, including everyone in this hall, will look
just as resplendent in all the colours of the rainbow under the polarising
microscope. But what do the colours mean?
Geologists use the polarising microscope to identify rock crystals.
We have slightly modified the setting, but the principle is the same. The
rainbow colours are generated by crystals with orderly arrangements of atoms
and molecules. We were puzzled at first. In rock crystals or liquid crystals
outside the organism, molecules and atoms certainly have an orderly arrangement
that stays ordered because there is no movement. But in the living organism
nothing is static, the molecules and atoms are moving all the time.
So how can they maintain the molecular order required to generate the brilliant
crystal colours? You will notice in the video sequence that the most active
parts of the organism are always the most brightly coloured, and hence most
like crystals.
The only explanation is that the molecules are moving coherently
together, so much so that they appear as ordered as a static crystal. To cut
a long story short, the molecules, especially the big ones, macromolecules
like proteins and nucleic acids, thoroughly infiltrated with water, are in
a dynamic liquid crystalline state. To begin with, they are completely
aligned with their electrical polarities to form a continuum that links up
the whole body, permeating throughout the connective tissues, the extra-cellular
matrix, and into the interior of every single cell. More importantly, all
the molecules, including the water, are dancing together as a whole, and the
more active they are, the more coherent, hence the brighter the colours.
Because light vibrates much faster than the coherent rhythmic
motions of the molecules, the light passing through the arrays of molecules
in the tissues and cells will still experience perfect order at every instant
– rather like a strobe light in a disco where people are doing synchronous
dancing - and that’s what we are seeing as brilliant colours. We have worked
out the physics and optics fairly well some time ago and published in peer-reviewed
journals [2-4], often having to use boring titles like, Quantitative
Image Analysis of Birefringent Biological Materials [4], because any mention of “crystals” and living organisms
would send referees ignorant of physics and chemistry into paroxysms of accusations
that we were guilty of “mysticism”.
So, these beautiful images of living organisms are direct evidence of their
high degree of coherence. And this high degree of coherence itself depends
on the liquid crystalline matrix that enables every single molecule to intercommunicate,
synchronize and syncopate with every other. The water, making up some 70 percent
by weight of the organism, is the most important part of the living liquid
crystalline matrix, without which it cannot form. Many molecules, DNA and
proteins, would not be stable; and would not function without water; water
is also crucial for the intercommunication that enables the organism to work
as a coherent, perfectly coordinated whole [5-9] (The
Liquid Crystalline Organism and Biological Water, ISIS scientific publication;
Water, Water Everywhere series, Science in Society 15 New
Age of Water series Science
in Society 23; Science
in Society 32), as I shall make clear later. Water plays the lead role
in living processes, but you will still find next to nothing on water in cell
biology or biochemistry textbooks. Mainstream biology has steadfastly ignored
the liquid crystalline organism and all its implications.
The quantum jazz player
As you have seen in the videos sequence, the organism is thick with coherent
activities on every scale, from the macroscopic down to the molecular and
below. I call the totality of these activities “quantum jazz” to emphasize
the immense diversity and multiplicity of players on all scales, the complexity
and coherence of the performance, and most importantly, the freedom and spontaneity
of it all.
The quantum coherent organism plays Quantum Jazz [10] (SiS
32) to create and recreate herself. Quantum jazz is the music of the organism
dancing life into being.
The quantum jazz players you saw in the video [11] (Quantum Jazz Parts 1&
II, http://www.i-sis.org.uk/onlinestore/av.php)
are small creatures that live in garden ponds and soils, set to music inspired
by them and edited, all done in-house by very talented people. Though no matter
how good they are, no one will ever reach the creative, artistic and technical
heights of the real quantum jazz players.
Quantum jazz is played out by the whole organism, in every nerve
and sinew, every muscle, every single cell, molecule, atom, and elementary
particle, emitting light and sound with wavelengths from nanometres to metres
and kilometres; spanning a musical range of 70 octaves or more, each improvising
spontaneously and freely, yet keeping in tune and in step with the whole.
There is no conductor or choreographer. Quantum jazz is written as it is
performed; every movement is new, shaped by what has gone before though not
quite. The organism never ceases to experience her environment and taking
it in for future reference, modifying her liquid crystalline matrix and neural
circuits, recoding and rewriting her genes, as described in the series of
articles Life after the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology (SiS
24 )[12].
The quantum jazz player lives strictly in the now, the ever-present
overarching the future and the past, composing and rewriting her life history
as she goes along, never quite finishing until she dies. But her script is
passed on to the next generation; each generation rewrites, edits, and adds
to the score, making it unique.
That’s ultimately why genetic engineering does not work. The
rogue genes forced or insinuated into the organism cannot intercommunicate
with the whole; they do not know the intricate score that has evolved to perfection
over billions of years, written in the genes created from the life histories
of all organisms in the species. Worse yet, the rogue genes have a tendency
to run amok, as described in my book, Living with the Fluid Genome
[13] (ISIS publication). I have no doubt that the fluidity of the genome is
also intimately connected with the liquid crystallinity of DNA, all part of
the quantum jazz of life.
Quantum jazz is why ordinary folks can talk and think at the
same time, while our breakfast is being processed to give us energy. It is
why top athletes can run a mile in under four minutes, and kung fu masters
can move with lightning speed and fly effortlessly through the air. The perfect
coordination required for simultaneous multiple tasks in everyday life and
in performing the most extraordinary feats both depend on a special state
of being whole, best described as “quantum coherence”. Quantum coherence is
a paradoxical state of wholeness that’s anything but uniform. It is infinitely
diverse and multiplex, it maximises both local freedom and global cohesion.
The technical and scientific details are in the Rainbow Worm [1], which also
presents other supporting empirical evidence and theoretical arguments.
The quantum coherent organism and quantum computation
The summary of the empirical evidence and theoretical arguments show that:
The organism is, in the ideal, a quantum superposition of coherent activities
over all space-times, constituting a pure coherent state towards which the
system tends to return on being perturbed.
The superposed quantum coherent activities are the stuff
of quantum jazz.
As ordinarily understood, quantum superposition is the simultaneous
co-existence of often contradictory states,
such as the proverbial Schrõdinger’s cat being both dead and alive,
or the spin of an elementary particle being both up and down. In the context
of the organism, quantum superposition means the simultaneous co-existence
of a multiplex of activities, from the fastest to the slowest, the most global
to the most local, even ones going in opposite directions.
Quantum superposition is closely connected with quantum entanglement.
Quantum entanglement, as ordinarily understood, is when different objects
or particles behave as one system no matter how far apart they are, and measuring
the state of one of them simultaneously determines the state of the other.
In the context of the organism, quantum entanglement means that different
parts of an organism, or different organisms in a group or population in a
coherent state –such as a flight of birds or shoal of fish - behave as one
system, so that interacting with one part affects every other part.
Quantum superposition and quantum entanglement are the signatures
of quantum coherence, and they have been attracting a lot of attention with
regard to the possibility of a quantum computer, as opposed to the conventional
classical computer now in use.
A quantum computer operates on the quantum bit or ‘qubit’ instead
of the ordinary bit in a classical computer. While the ordinary bit is a simple
binary 1 or 0, the qubit can hold 1, 0, or crucially, a quantum superposition
of 1 and 0. In fact, it can hold anything up to an infinite number
of values in superposition [14-15] (Quantum Computer?
Is It Alive?. ISISNews 11/12; The Quantum Information
Revolution, SiS 22).A quantum computer can in theory do computations
that are intractable with a classical computer or achieve exponential speedup
in solving certain problems. And building an actual quantum computer has become
the holy grail of a new breed of quantum information technologists.
Recently, a company claimed to have built the first potential commercial
quantum computer, and attracted $60 million in venture capital [16] (Quantum Computer or
Red-Flag? SiS 40), though it is very likely to be a red flag. I
doubt if a useful quantum computer as generally conceived can ever be built.
To my mind, the perfect quantum computer already exists: it is
the quantum coherent living organism, which however, can never be used as
a computer, because an organism can never be controlled or subjugated to serve
purposes other than its own. In the living organism, astronomical numbers
of parallel distributed quantum processing are taking place simultaneously
at all times [1], with each determining the outcome of all others.
Consider the elementary process of a protein folding into shape,
a difficult problem even for the fastest classical computer. It takes about
300 years for a classical computer to simulate a small peptide of 23 amino-acid
residues (with associated water molecules) to fold into shape. By running
simulations simultaneously on some 140 000 individual computers around the
world, researchers took over three weeks [17]. Real proteins, however, fold
to perfection in several microseconds [18].
It is very important for proteins to fold correctly. Incorrect
folding makes proteins aggregate into insoluble, inflexible clumps associated
with wasting diseases such as mad cow disease, Alzheimer’s Diesease, Huntington’s
and Parkinson’s Disease.
Quantum coherence and circular thermodynamics of the organism
The quantum coherent organism is also an ideal thermodynamic system that
stores and mobilize coherent living energy perfectly [2]. An intuitive picture
is a life cycle coupled to energy flow. A cycle is perpetual return and renewal.
Thermodynamically, a perfect cycle does not dissipate energy or generate entropy.
Energy is mobilised most efficiently and rapidly, the energy remaining coherent
as it is mobilised. Not only is entropy not accumulate within, but the waste
and entropy exported to the outside is also minimised (Fig. 1). Of course,
this is an ideal, completely coherent organism that will never grow old or
die. But the more one approaches that ideal, the more healthy we are. (If
you want to know the secret of immortality and eternal youth, read my book.)
Figure 1. The quantum coherent
organism and its circular thermodynamics
Part of the secret is that the life cycle contains an astronomical
number of cycles of activities in quantum superposition; or, in thermodynamic
terms, all coupled together in such a way that the energy yielding activities
supply energy directly to the energy requiring activities (see Fig. 2). You
can think of the cycles as biological rhythms and biochemical cycles, electromagnetic
waves, local circuits of electrons and protons zapping around, down to vibrations
of molecules and electrons.
To imagine what it’s really like, magnify each cycle in the diagram, and
you get the same picture as the whole; and you can do this many times over
until you come to the smallest cycle, representing say, an electronic vibration
that has the period of femto-seconds (10-15s). This property of
‘self-similarity’ belongs to mathematical structures called fractals. Fractals
fundamentally describe living processes, the most visible are fern leaves,
branching patterns of trees and blood vessels, but later as you will see,
also heartbeats (and in my book [1], space-time itself, though I won’t go
into that here).
Figure 2. The quantum superposition
of cycles of activities in the organism
As you can imagine, the more cycles there are, the more energy
is stored, and for longer, because the more times the energy is used or recycled.
This recycling and storage of coherent energy is against all previous thinking,
even among those most enthusiastic about recycling of materials. Energy,
they say, cannot be reused, because it flows in one direction only. But once
you realise that coherent energy can be stored then the idea of re-use
and recycling becomes obvious.
This circular thermodynamic model of the organism has important applications
not only in holistic health, but also in ecology. It aptly describes an integrated,
zero-emission, zero-waste farm that turns wastes and greenhouse gases into
food and energy resources for mitigating climate change and solving the food
and energy crisis [19-20] (Dream Farm 2, How to Beat Climate Change
& Post Fossil Fuel Economy, SiS 29; Sustainable
Systems as Organisms, ISIS scientific publication) as described in detail
in this report [21] Food
Futures Now: *Organic *Sustainable *Fossil Fuel Free (ISIS Publication)
we launched in the UK parliament earlier this year. The many lifecycles in
the integrated farm is effectively a sustainable ecosystem, each life cycle
storing energy and material for the whole, in analogy to the activity cycles
in the organism. It is the model of sustainable development we need to replace
the mainstream model of unsustainable infinite growth that is now going bust
in a big way.
The model of the quantum coherent organism depends on
reciprocity and cooperation, rather than relentless Darwinian competition
as in the mainstream model [22] (On
the Nature of Sustainable Economic Systems, ISIS scientific publication)
It will literally make love and end wars.
Hopefully, this is a new paradigm that will
support a new world order that’s much closer to how nature is, that will enable
us to live sustainably within her. Let me highlight some of the major implications
of the quantum coherent organism.
Major implications of the quantum coherent organism
Most spontaneous and free
The quantum coherent organism takes us well beyond the conventional view
of organisms as machines (From Molecular Machines to Coherent Organism, ISIS
scientific publication) [23]. It gives a whole new meaning to life, and the
quality of life.
The organism, as you have seen is an incredible hive of activities from the
very fast to the very slow, the local to global, all perfectly coupled together,
so perfect that each activity appears to be operating as freely and spontaneously
as the whole. To be quantum coherent is to be most spontaneous and free.
Freedom is real, as I have argued in my paper, The
Biology of Free Will [24] (ISIS scientific publication). The organism
is radically uncontrollable in a mechanistic sense. If you try to do so, you
compromise it, making it ill, and ultimately killing it. That’s why people
would rather die than lose their freedom.
Mechanistic medicine fails for the same reason: it attempts to impose mechanistic
control and prevents the restoration of quantum coherence that characterizes
the healthy organism, resulting in terrible “side effects” including death.
The quantum wave function that describes the coherent organism is a superposition
of all possibilities. It implies that the future is entirely open, and
the potentials infinite. That’s just what a healthy person should feel
like. It is not possible to predict the future from the outside, only from
the point of view of the coherent organism within, which is why the coherent
organism is radically uncontrollable.
A reformulation of quantum mechanics shows that an intention towards the
future could determine the now. (This is not so strange when you think about
it: of course, what I want to become will determine what I do now, but apparently,
quantum theory is telling us that too.) Starting in the 1960s, Yakir Aharonov
at Tel Aviv University in Israel and a number of colleagues and collaborators
ask what would happen if, instead of just focussing on the initial state in
conventional quantum mechanics, the quantum system is described both in terms
of a pre-selected, prepared state and a final post-selected state.
They showed that both the initial and final wave-functions will influence
the outcome of measurements carried out in the now between the past
and the future, and giving different answers
Remember? The quantum coherent organism is spontaneous and free; she lives
in the ever-present overarching past and future, and by her very intentions,
never ceases to create the now. The philosophical implications are
profound and we can think about it for the rest of our life. But we must move
on.
Vibrant sensitive intercommunicating whole, natural being and coherent
society
To be quantum coherent is to have energy at will, to mobilize energy most
rapidly and efficiently, and to be sensitive to extremely weak signals, whether
electrical, mechanical, chemical, or as heat [1, 24]. Because of the large
amounts of energy stored everywhere within the system, the organism does not
have to be pulled and dragged into action. So what makes the coherent organism
tick?
The new key to biological and social function is intercommunication,
not command and control. Each is as much in control as it is sensitive
and responsive. This describes a perfect democracy, a coherent society of
distributed control in which the private and the public, the individual and
the collective are not inevitably opposed as in the mechanistic Darwinian
society we inhabit.
When intercommunication is perfect, it is nonlocal and
instantaneous, transcending the usual separations of space and time. That
accounts for the perfect coordination of functions in the healthy organism,
which I shall say more about later. It also describes how ideas and feelings
can spread like wild-fire in a society; and more esoterically, how something
could be in multiple places at the same time and different entities far, far
apart can exchange information instantaneously, all part of The Quantum Information
Revolution [15] that I won’t have time to go into.
The unity of conscious experience
Quantum coherence is the prerequisite for conscious experience [26],
as I have argued in detail in a paper published in 1997 (Quantum Coherence
and Conscious Experience). It is why each and every one of us thinks of
ourselves as “I” in the singular even though we are a multiplicity of organs,
tissues and cells, not to mention the ten times as many bacteria as cells
that live inside us and on our skin, most of them doing us good if we treat
them well. When we say “I”, the little bacteria are saying “me too” in chorus.
I suggested that quantum coherence
enables us to gate and bind our experiences in a series of non-local simultaneities
that appear abruptly as large-scale phase-synchronised electrical activities
observed in widely separate parts of the brain that has no obvious source
in the brain itself, but are generated in the liquid crystalline matrix in
which all cells, including neurons in the brain, are embedded. This has been
corroborated since.
It is now estimated that between 40
to 65 percent of all activities in the brain is phase-synchronized at any
one time [27], and these synchronized activities in different frequency bands
– especially the gamma (35-50 Hz) -zHz)HH are indeed implicated in gating, segmenting
and integrating sensory input, according to neurophysiologist Roy John
at New York University School of Medicine in the
United States. Information in the brain is not encoded by the firing of dedicated
neurons in particular brain regions that represents specific stimulus or features,
but rather by distinctive temporal patterns of synchronized firing dispersed
among many brain regions. Individual neurons can take part in numerous such
temporal patterns. John proposes that intrinsic excitability cycles modulate
the reactivity of cell ensembles at frequencies in the range of gamma oscillations
(35-50 Hz), selecting particular subsets of neurons in the receiving system
that can discharge synchronously with this distinctive temporal pattern. These
external inputs are encoded as time series of synchronized firing in “parallel,
multiplexed channels within each sensory pathway, offset by 25 ms (50Hz) and
sampled every 80 ms.” Within each channel, the length of the representational
time series appears to be 80-100 ms.
As I have emphasized, phase synchrony is just one kind of phase
correlation, which happens to be the easiest to detect. Infinite possibilities
exist for phase correlations, including anti-phase and harmonics, or indeed,
complex fractal correlations as exhibited by the healthy heart rhythm (see
later)
Appropriate effortless action
The Chinese Taoist text Wu wei, is usually understood as “no action”.
I suggest that’s not the case; rather, it is the ideal of “no bother”, or
effortless, coherent action, taken when the moment is ripe, when the entire
universe is at one with you. You’ll have to be a real sage to achieve
that.
Freedom, spontaneity, sensitivity, effortless action and effortless
creation are all Taoist ideals cultivated in traditional Chinese art and poetry,
in life itself. That is the way to a healthy life, without stress and strife.
Again, we need to contemplate that for the rest of our life, but we shall
move on.
Quantum coherent organism in a quantum universe
When I proposed quantum coherence for the organism in 1993, even my best
friends would not accept it. But quantum coherence has become more fashionable
since (see the Quantum World Coming series, Science in Society 22 [28]).
Some people have even considered that the entire universe is quantum coherent
[29] (Quantum Phases and Quantum
Coherence, SiS 22), like a super-organism, I certainly think so
[1, 30] (Life &
the Universe After the Copenhagen Interpretation, SiS 34). What
does that imply for human action and intention? They are not to be taken lightly,
for the local can affect the global and vice versa. We are all, from
the tiniest microbe to whales and the redwood tree, from elementary particles
to galaxies, all entangled within nature, co-creating and willing it into
existence from moment to moment.
* * *
Quantum Coherence & Quantum Medicine
In the second half of my talk, I would like to go into some specific examples
of how quantum coherence translates into quantum medicine.
Complex music of the healthy heart
Medical physicists and mathematicians have been studying the heartbeat for
the past 20 years because it looks so variable in healthy subjects. They talk
about the “complexity of the heartbeat” and how best to wrest signs of dynamic
order out of apparently random variability, which could tell doctors whether
the person is healthy or not [31].
The most exciting discovery about the healthy heartbeat is indeed the rich
mathematical structures underlying the variability that distinguishes it from
arbitrary randomness; in much the way that music can be distinguished from
noise. The healthy heart beats to the complex rhythm of quantum jazz.
The variability of the healthy heartbeat exhibits fractal self-similarity
over a range of time scales, which is a sure sign of complex correlations.
The self-similarity of the healthy heart rhythm can be demonstrated most clearly
with a mathematical procedure called ‘wavelet transform’, which estimates
the differing spectrum of frequencies contributing to the changing signal
at different time scales (see Fig. 3).
Figure 3. Wavelet
analysis of heartbeat times series from a healthy subject (top and middle
panel) and a patient with sleep apnea (bottom panel). See main text for details
(modified from [32]).
The horizontal axis is time corresponding to about 1 700 heartbeats. The
vertical axis is the scale of analysis increasing from 5 to about 300 s.
The brighter colours indicate larger values of the wavelet amplitudes, corresponding
to large heartbeat fluctuations. The white tracks represent the maximum wavelet
transform lines, which exhibit a tree-like self-similar structure. So magnifying
a portion of the upper panel corresponding to 200 beats on the horizontal
axis and about 5 to 75 s on the vertical axis results in a structure (middle
panel) resembling the whole. In contrast, the wavelet analysis of the times
series from a patient with sleep apnea shows the loss of the self-similar
structure.
There are many other ways to expose the dynamic
order underlying the apparent irregularity of the healthy heartbeat. Most
importantly, this dynamic structure is destroyed if the time series is shuffled,
or randomised so that phase information is lost. Phase correlation is a signature
of quantum coherence.
The significance of these findings is best described by
one team of researchers [33]: the healthy heartbeat is “more like a symphony
than a solo performance.”
The heart is obviously not a solo player in the quantum
jazz of life. Instead, it is in symphony with all other players, intermeshing,
synchronizing and syncopating with their varied rhythms, reflecting the correlations
and couplings in a system that is quantum coherent in the ideal.
The coupling between heart and other rhythms
is quite precise, extending to phase correlations among all the body rhythms,
which is why shuffling the heartbeat time series results in the loss of the
exquisite hidden dynamic order that includes precise phase correlations. An
unhealthy heart, by contrast, is no longer intercommunicating, but falls back
onto its own intrinsic rhythm, which is why it appears superficially more
regular while the dynamic hidden order is destroyed.
The study of heart rate variability looks so
promising that patents have been granted recently on mathematical procedures
for “diagnosing heart disease, predicting sudden death, and analysing treatment
response.”
Looking further ahead, this minimally invasive/intervention
approach may be just the paradigm change we need in medicine to deliver health
to the nation safely and effectively, based on an intellectually rigorous
holistic perspective that’s nevertheless centred on the individual organism.
Researchers at HeartMath Institute
in Boulder Creek California show how the heartbeat betrays all our
feelings, good and bad; and feeling good may be the way to health and general
well being by establishing large-scale synchrony between heart, respiratory
rhythm and brainwaves [34] (Happiness Is A Heartbeat
Away, SiS 35).
Of all the organs, the heart generates by far the most powerful
and most extensive rhythmic electromagnetic field in the body. The electrical
voltage generated, recorded as the Electrocardiogram (ECG), is about 60 times
greater than the electrical activity produced by the brain, and it can permeate
every cell in the body, via the liquid crystalline matrix. The magnetic
component of the heart’s field is about 5 000 times stronger than the magnetic
field produced by the brain, and can be measured several feet away from the
body with the SQUID magnetometers. The electromagnetic waves generated by
the heart are immediately registered in the brain waves.
Thus, information about a person’s emotional state is also communicated
throughout the body and into the external environment via the heart’s electromagnetic
field.
HeartMath researchers propose that the heart’s electromagnetic
waves may interact with the fields of organs and other structures to create
hologram-like interference patterns. that “in-form the activity of all bodily
functions.”
And conversely, the heart is also informed by the activity of all bodily
functions, which is reflected in its complex rhythm from moment to moment
[31].
Quantum coherence and sensitivity to weak electromagnetic fields
The new paradigm of life sciences is the physics of the organism as opposed
to the physics of dead matter. And it has large implications for the continuing
debate over the health hazards of weak electromagnetic fields (EMFs), currently
focussed on the microwaves of mobile phone and wi-fi [35] (Drowning in a Sea of Microwaves, SiS
34). Cancer risks triple and quadruple near mobile phone transmitters
[36] (Cancer Risks from Microwaves
Confirmed, SiS 34), which are also among the main suspects in killing
birds and bees [37, 38] (Mobile
Phones & Vanishing Birds, Mobile Phones and
Vanishing Bees, SiS 34).
The list of hazards associated with EMFs grows: brain damage
in rats exposed for two hours, still detected after 50 days. DNA breaks and
chromosomal abnormalities in cells, brain tumours in people, decrease in sperm
counts and sperm quality in men, sterility in mice, and a host of microwave
sicknesses in people living near mobile phone transmitters.
But the legal exposure limits are still set far too high; they
assume our bodies are as insensitive as bags of inert salt solutions, so if
the microwaves don’t burn you, then it is OK.
The biggest barrier to understanding the biological effects
of weakEMFs is the same as that barring all forms of energy or quantum medicine
from the mainstream: there is nothing in the conventional physics of dead
matter that could make sense of them [39, 40] (Non-Thermal Electromagnetic
Field Effects, Fields
of Influence pt. 4 - The Excluded Biology, SiS 17).
Why are organisms so sensitive to weak electromagnetic fields?
It is because they actually use electric currents and electromagnetic fields
for intercommunication, and the liquid crystalline matrix is predisposed to
facilitate that, as I shall show later.
Harold Saxon Burr in the 1930s [41] and Robert Becker in the
1960s to 1990s [42] had detected electric fields in developing embryos and
adult organisms, and provided evidence that electric currents and fields are
what the body uses for intercommunication, to heal itself, and in some cases,
even regenerate lost parts.
Since the 1980s, electric currents flowing throughout the body, and even from
single cells, can be detected with the highly sensitive SQUID (superconducting
quantum interference device) magnetometer, which has been used to image the
electrical activities of the brain since the 1990s [43]. But you can easily
detect currents flowing through your arms and legs and especially emanating
from the heart.
Solid-state physicist Herbert Frőhlich
[44, 45] pointed out that the organism is densely packed with dielectric molecules
(as in a solid-state device), which both react to and generate EMFs, and hence
the laws of solid-state physics would apply to the organism as first approximation.
He proposed that metabolic energy could ‘pump’ the living system into a state
of “coherent excitations”, the way that pumping energy into a solid-state
device could make its light-emitting atoms vibrate in concert to produce coherent
light or laser. The term “coherent excitation” is wonderfully evocative. Frőhlich’s
ideas apply even better to the liquid crystalline living matrix.
Unlike an ordinary laser that’s coherent
in a single frequency of EMF, the living organism is potentially coherent
over a multitude of frequencies spanning many orders of magnitude, 10 or more,
so it might indeed be sensitive to EMFs over the entire range of frequencies
from extremely low frequency radio waves to microwaves and beyond.
There is now evidence that molecules
do intercommunicate by singing the same notes to one another (and flashing
the same signal) [46] (The Real Bioinformatics
Revolution, SiS 33). Conventional wisdom has it that molecules
in solution ‘bump’ into each other by chance, and if they fit together like
lock and key, they can latch on and do whatever is necessary. But the cell
is extremely crowded in a liquid crystalline state, where practically nothing
is free to diffuse, not even the water. So how can molecules find one another
in the first instance? It is like trying to find a friend in a very large
and crowded ballroom in the dark. By intercommunicating or resonating at particular
frequencies of electromagnetic waves, molecules can now hear and see one another,
as well as become ineluctably attracted to one another. And that can happen
only in a coherent, noiseless system. In a coherent, noiseless system, ultraweak
signals can have extraordinarily large biological effects.
The usual denial that very weak EMFs
can have biological effects is that the energies in these fields are “below
the thermal threshold” of the random molecular motion characteristic of dead
matter (equilibrium thermodynamics), which will certainly swamp out the weak
signals.
But coherently vibrating molecules
in the physics of life, far from swamping out the weak signals, will sum up
their response to the weak signal, and hence result in a substantial effect.
To use another analogy, the organism
is like an exquisitely tuned receiver (and emitter) of EMFs over the widest
possible range of frequencies. That’s why the quantum jazz of the organism
is so fantastic; its antennae are tuned to signals from many frequencies,
from the earth, the sun the moon, perhaps even from distant stars and galaxies,
and will respond to them with new music. But quantum jazz could also be sabotaged
by malignant interference.
The liquid crystalline matrix and acupuncture meridians
The liquid crystalline matrix is not only sensitive to EMFs, but also to
subtle changes in pressure, temperature and pH, which it converts to electrical
signals. It is predisposed for the instantaneous, noiseless intercommunication
that enables the organism to function as a perfectly coordinated whole.
I became interested in the acupuncture meridians of traditional
Chinese medicine because they are clearly involved in intercommunication throughout
the body, but all attempts to pin them down to anatomical structures have
failed so far. My suspicion turned to the connective tissues and collagen.
The most abundant protein in the body is collagen, which form
fibres and other aligned structures in the connective tissues. We had started
to study the self-assembly of collagen and its structure in various connective
tissues, and discovered how water associated with collagen is intrinsic to
its liquid crystallinity [6].
In a paper published in 1998, David Knight and I proposed that the water
channels aligned in and around collagen fibres might be the basis of the acupuncture
meridian system of traditional Chinese medicine [47] (Liquid
Crystalline Meridians, ISIS scientific publication).It was already known
that collagen conducts 100 times as much along the length of its fibre than
perpendicular to it, very likely due to the water molecules aligned along
the groves and surfaces of the collagen molecules that form the fibre, and
various other composite structures, and hence it was reasonable to assume
that meridians would follow the length of the fibres in some way. By contrast,
acupuncture points typically have low electrical resistances compared with
the surrounding skin, and may therefore correspond to singularities or gaps
between collagen fibres, or, where collagen fibres are oriented at
right angles to the dermal layer.
Positive electricity zaps through water chains
It has been suspected for some time that the water molecules aligned by proteins
and membranes may provide a special intercommunication channel, in the form
of jump conduction of protons (positive electricity), which is much faster
than nerve conduction, and faster than conduction of electricity through wires.
And this has been confirmed since [48] (Positive
Electricity Zaps Through Water Chains, SiS 28) (see Fig. 4). Proton
jump conduction is very fast because the proton doesn’t actually travel from
one end to the other but depends on a chain of hydrogen-bonded water molecules
to relay the charge, so as a proton sticks on at one end, another pops off
at the other. These chains of hydrogen bonded water molecules have been found
in channels formed by proton pumps that go across the cell membrane, and act
like ‘proton wires’.
Figure .4. Jump conduction of
proton along a chain of hydrogen-bonded water molecules. Note that it can
go in either direction.
There are other observations consistent with our hypothesis,
which I have summarised in a paper presented at a conference on acupuncture
in 2005 [49] (Acupuncture, Coherent Energy
and Liquid Crystalline Meridians), but even more stunning research
results have appeared since, especially on water.
Water is the most abundant substance on earth, and life, as we
know it, is impossible without water.[50] (Two-States
Water Explains All? SiS 32). Its properties are very strange and
completely out of line with those of compounds of its neighbours in the Periodic
Table.
The ability of water molecules to form hydrogen bonds with one
another is responsible for the strangeness of water and its ability to support
life. Water forms dynamic structures both in bulk water and in confined spaces.
First sighting of structured water in confined spaces
“Structured water” is serious science. Generations of big instruments have
been deployed to detect it: ultra-fast electron crystallography is among the
latest, after more than a decade of neutron scattering, X-ray diffraction,
nuclear magnetic resonance, etc., not to mention the considerable number-crunching
to extract information out of the data, and hours upon hours of computer simulations
that go into modelling it.
But no one has actually seen structured
water itself, until it was caught on camera; not an ordinary camera, admittedly
[51] (First Sighting of Structured
Water, SiS 28). Researchers at Drexel University, Philadelphia
and University of Illinois in the USA, and the Tokyo Institute of Technology
in Japan, produced stunning images on high-resolution transmission electron
microscopy (TEM) of carbon nanotubes of different sizes with water trapped
inside them [52].
The researchers discovered that in large diameter carbon nanotubes (10 to
200 nm), water behaves conventionally, much as they would in an ordinary capillary
tube. The water inside the hollow tube shows up in low contrast, and at the
boundary between liquid and gas phases, a typical meniscus (concave surface)
is observed.
In small diameter nanotubes (2 to 5 nm), however, liquid water shows up in
high contrast, giving a bright beady appearance (Fig. 4), quite unlike the
water trapped in the bigger nanotubes. There is no meniscus separating the
liquid from the gas phase. In fact, the water molecules appear not to interact
with the wall of the nanotube, but concentrate on interacting with one another,
leaving a gap between the liquid water and the wall. They look like multiple
strands of pearls twisted together
Figure 4. High
resolution TEM of big nanotube (a) and small nanotube (b) with water trapped
inside (Courtesy of Dr. Ye, H.)
This raises a host of interesting questions, including what kind of proton-conduction
properties such water cylinders inside narrow nanotubes would have, as they
are like a superconducting cable of many proton-wires twisted up together.
Do such potentially super-conducting proton cables exist in living organisms?
Collagen aligns water into superconducting cables?
Gary Fullerton, Ivan Cameron and colleagues at Texas University San Antonio
in the United States identified phase-transition like behaviour in the water
associated with the collagen of bovine tendon on solid-state nuclear magnetic
resonance (nmr) as the tendon is dried. On the basis of the data, they proposed
a model suggesting that the collagen water is structured in regular chains
along the collagen fibrils, fitting into the grooves of the triple helix [53,
54] (Collagen Water
Structure Revealed, SiS 32) (see Fig. 5).
The collagen water chains are reminiscent of those seen in carbon
nanotubes <5nm diameter (see above), and I would not be surprised if some
regularly structured proton cables, organized by, or between collagen fibres,
which are abundant in connective tissues, were actual acupuncture meridians.
The cell imaging community has been excited
by a recent discovery: second harmonic generation by collagen fibres [55].
Fire infrared laser photons at collagen and you get back frequency doubled
uv light that sums the energy of two infrared photons together. This kind
of non-linear optical response was previously only found in rock crystals
like quartz. No one in the cell biology community using the technique has
commented on the significance of the observation, i.e., the collagen is liquid
crystalline, and water is integral to this liquid crystalline structure [6]
making it behave like a quartz crystal. Figure 5. Cross
section of a collagen fibril containing 7 triple helices (individual collagen
molecules(, each of which has 3 x 6 = 18 water chains covering it completely.
Acupuncture points connect with the brain
Soon after our paper on liquid crystalline meridians
was published, there appeared a report from Cho Zang-Hee and his research
team [56]. Cho, a medical physicist at the University of Washington, Seattle in the United States, pioneered the proton
emission tomography (PET) scanner. He injured his back while on holiday in
Korea, and found almost instant
relief with acupuncture treatment. With his curiosity thus aroused, he began
experimenting with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) on volunteer
medical students to see if he could detect changes in their brain when acupuncture
treatment was given to them.
He flashed a light in front
of their eyes and, as expected, the visual cortex of the brain lit up on the
fMRI. Then Cho had an acupuncturist stick a needle into one of the acupuncture
points at the side of the little toe, which is traditionally used to treat
disorders of the eye. In one person after another, the visual cortex lit up,
just as if they had been stimulated with a flash of light in their eyes.
Cho had set a new trend in acupuncture investigations.
Many fMRI and PET scan studies were to follow, which demonstrated that acupuncture
treatments could indeed stimulate or inhibit specific parts of the brain,
though the story is more complicated, as there are different schools of acupuncture
[49].
Moxibustion lights up meridians
Another development comes from the laboratory of Fritz
Popp. Fritz and his colleagues at the International Biophysics Institute in
Neuss, Germany used a standard method of infrared thermography - which images
the heat from the human body, and is sensitive to infrared radiation between
3.4 to 5 mm wavelength – to see what
happens when a moxibustion stick was burnt near an acupuncture point. To their
amazement and delight, they saw light channels appearing after a few minutes,
tracing out the major acupuncture meridians [57]. When the moxibustion stick
was removed, the lit-up meridians also disappeared within half a second.
Would an excited and conducting proton cable
give off infrared light? Water has several strong absorption peaks within
the infrared range, and it would not be surprising if excited conducting water
would also emit within this range. The rate at which it disappeared is suggestive
of the speed with which a proton current can cease to flow.
Liquid crystalline water at the interface
The importance of water in the cell has been argued most
cogently by Gilbert Ling over a period of more than 40 years, with very few
people who were really equipped to understand him; as it required skills that
cut across the disciplines of physics, chemistry and biology [58, 59] (Strong
Medicine for Cell Biology, SiS 24).. Ling had proposed long ago
that water in the cell is completely aligned in multiple layers on the hydrophilic
surfaces of membranes and proteins through dipole interactions. And that could
explain many puzzling properties of the cell, such as how it naturally excludes
sodium in favour of potassium, without having to invoke sodium/potassium pumps
that require a great deal of ATP, and energy to make the ATP. Furthermore
this ‘interfacial’ water aligned on the hydrophilic surfaces has very different
properties compared with bulk water, for example, it is much more ordered
like ice, but unlike ice, it will never freeze.
A most pleasing and convincing demonstration that cell water
really makes a difference to the cell comes from another scientist who was
inspired by Gilbert Ling’s work. Ludwig Edelmann at Saarlandes University
in Germany showed that when great care is taken over fixation procedures that
do not strip the cell water from the proteins, a very different and much more
aesthetically appealing picture of the cell is obtained [60]. It is so beautiful
it took my breath away when he first showed it to me [61], as it looks much
more like the dynamic liquid crystalline cell I have in mind (see Fig. 6).
Figure 6. Two faces of the cell: alive and fully hydrated
(left), fixed and dehydrated (right) (courtesy of Edelman G.)
Gerald Pollack’s research team at the University of Washington,
Seattle, in the United States, also inspired by Ling, offered an uncanny,
apparent confirmation of Ling’s hypothesis [62, 63]. Using small micron-sized
spheres (microspheres) as solutes that can be seen under the microscope, they
found that water forms a massive exclusion zone (EZ) extending up to hundreds
of micrometres away from the surfaces of hydrophilic gels (see Fig. 7).
The EZ is typically millions of water molecules deep. Pollack
and his colleagues have ruled out all sources of artefacts that they and others
could think of, and recently confirmed and extended their spectacular findings
[64, 65] (Liquid Crystalline Water
at the Interface, SiS 38).
Figure 7. Clear exclusion zone free of microspheres next
to the gel surface
They found that a wide range of hydrophilic
gels gave EZ water: polyvinyl alcohol, polyacrylamide, polyacrylc acid, Nafion
(used as a proton exchange membrane in fuel cells), and biological tissues
such as a bundle of rabbit muscle or collagen. In fact, a single layer of
hydrophilic charged groups coated on any surface is sufficient to give an
EZ. The requirement is to have chemical groups that can form hydrogen bonds
with a first layer of water molecules, and the other layers then stack up
on top. Similarly, solutes need not be microspheres, they could be red blood
cells, bacteria, colloidal gold, and even molecules such as serum albumin
labelled with a fluorescent dye, and a fluorescent dye molecule as small as
200-300 daltons. All are excluded from EZ water.
Most interestingly, EZ water was also found at the air-water
interface. The EZ layer, thick enough to be seen easily with the naked eye,
was sufficiently stiff to be lifted up with a glass rod without breaking.
As EZ water can be produced in bulk, it is easy to
demonstrate other altered properties. NMR measurements confirm that the layer
is associated with decreased mobility (increased order) relative to the bulk
water, while infrared imaging showed it emitted much less than bulk water,
again indicative of increased order. In fact, it is liquid crystalline water
There was already a hint that the EZ has unusual electrical potential when
pH sensitive dyes were used as solutes to see if they too, were excluded from
the EZ. Indeed, they were, but they also showed up a zone of unusually low
pH (red band) right above the clear EZ (see Fig. 4). A low pH means high concentration
of protons (H+) immediately next to the EZ, and decreasing away
from it. An excess of protons suggests that charge separation has taken place
in the water molecules as follows:
H2O -> H+ + OH-
(1)
So where did the negatively charged OH-
ions go? A measurement of electrical potential shows that away from the EZ,
the bulk solution had the same electrical potential everywhere, however, as
soon as the measuring electrode enters the EZ, the electrical potential dropped
sharply to –120mV or more, depending on the gel involved, remaining at that
level well into the gel itself.
This macroscopic separation of charges is stable, as is the EZ itself. It
is in fact a water battery. A battery, like any other, could be used to power
light bulbs or your labtop, and could be the most exciting application of
liquid crystalline water. But what charges up the water battery? It takes
energy to separate the charges, so where does the energy come from? That too
was a surprise.
It turns out that water is sensitive to light. The EZ thickens on being exposed
to light, which means that light enhances the formation of liquid crystalline
water. The entire spectrum of sunlight is effective, but the peaks are in
the visible blue and especially the invisible near-infrared (3 000 nm) regions.
A mere 5 minute exposure to the infrared light will cause the EZ to thicken
several-fold. And if you connect up the EZ and the bulk water above to an
external circuit, there is a measurable current, which lasts for a considerable
time after the infrared light is turned off.
Green plants and especially blue-green bacteria have been splitting water
for billions of years, in order to obtain energy from the sun; and in the
process fixing carbon dioxide to make carbohydrates and other macromolecules
to feed practically the entire biosphere. The separation of charges in the
formation of liquid crystalline water is essentially the same process. (So
there may be a real sense in which sunbathing can energize the body!)
Pollack asks tantalisingly: Can water replace oil? The applications
of liquid crystalline water are wide-open. His lab is already working on a
water-purification device based on separating liquid crystalline water of
the EZ from the bulk water. (Liquid crystalline water is reputed to have health-promoting
properties, though that is still unconfirmed.) Another application is anti-fouling
agent: a coating that essentially prevents any impurities in water from sticking.
I’ve sketched the barest outlines of the exciting quantum revolution
that has been happening over the past decades, and I am sure this conference
will move it on much further. I thank all my colleagues at ISIS for their
input and support of this work over the years, especially my husband Peter
Saunders and cofounder of ISIS, and thank you for you attention.
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